Products and services associated with the IoT currently operate in closed ecosystems like Home Automation, in effect, they are simply networked products with linking software. Part machine to machine (M2M) and part human to machine or machine to human (H2M setup and observation and M2H alerts).

The IoT is an open ecosystem, made up of billions of product, services and people ecosystems.

While many people will associate an ontology with a website, software or information system, the key factor in IoT products or services is;

Information uniqueness

Information parity

Information exchange policies

IoT products and services also require

Governance frameworks

Security frameworks

Privacy/data storage frameworks

An ontology is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really or fundamentally exist for a particular domain.

In order to digitize products and services for the IoT an open network, they are required to fit into several types of ontology including;

Global ontologies

Domain ontologies

Geographic ontologies

More information about ontologies and how they are created can be found here;

About the Author

Karl Smith is Computer Scientist or as he describes himself a Creative Scientist. He has worked as an Instructional Designer, Information Architect, Innovator, User Experience Architect and Human Centered Design Consultant. He is also an entrepreneur, founder and director, CIO, CXO involved in startups, offering development, capability building (recruitment), global business development and global program management.

Karl Smith is an acknowledged leader in the field of Human Centred Design, User Experience and Usability and has been honoured with a Fellowship by the British Computer Society. He is also the Founder of several organisations including The Human Centered Design Society.